And speaking of our flagship university, NM's congressional delegation announced that UNM will receive a grant "to provide training, licensing and induction services to Native Americans interested in pursuing a career in education."

August March rang Albuquerque legend Gordy Andersen (Black Maria, Cracks in the Sidewalk, Jerry’s Kidz, et al) to discuss his formative experiences coming of age as a first generation high desert punk.

Albuquerque Business First reports that ArtBar has been granted a temporary liquor license by the New Mexico Regulation and Licensing Division and can reopen, but organizer Julia Mandeville says organizers need to meet to decide whether or not to reopen the private, nonprofit bar.

There's a new baby elephant at the zoo, and as usual nobody there can figure out what to name it. Maybe YOU can help? (The vote is between three names, but if enough of us demand "Kraktow, Crusher of Men" they have to listen, right?)

Or apologizing for it? Read and decide.

Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, who self-identifies as “the Margaret Mead of the weapons labs” has written a thorough debunking of the myth that the disk-misplacing “cowboys and buttheads” (i.e., scientists) at Los Alamos National Labs live in a rarified “culture of arrogance.” (Either that, or he’s their sock puppet, as some have suggested.) What’s interesting is that he mostly blames the ham-fisted interference of the Bush administration. If you remember the series of embarrassing security-breach headlines that started with Wen Ho Lee and ended with a takeover of the lab’s management by a for-profit consortium, Gusterson’s brief three-act revisionist history is totally worth reading. (A tip of the hat to Slashdot for blogging this story in the first place.)

The fire has closed in on Los Alamos National Laboratory property—within a mile—but hasn’t reached the lab yet.

Spokesperson Kevin Roark said in an interview with the Alibi that there are a variety of nuclear facilities at LANL and several metric tons of uranium, plutonium, americium and others. These materials are kept in the most secure facilities at the lab, he said—deep inside vaults within concrete and steel buildings. “There is no threat from wildland fires,” he said.

During the Cerro Grande fire eleven years ago, the blaze ate up 7,500 acres of LANL property, Roark added, and there was no release of nuclear or hazardous material.

The Cerro Grande fire raged for more than a month in 2000, burned Bandelier National Monument and left 400 people in Los Alamos without homes.

There were concerns after the fire about the airborne release of contaminants, but Roark says monitoring showed that Cerro Grande was no more or less radioactive than any forest fire. Read a full assessment of the aftermath by the Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety and the Nuclear Policy Project.

The fire also caused erosion and runoff, and contaminants threatened the Rio Grande. But Roark assures: “There were not appreciable levels of radioactivity in the runoff.” After the Cerro Grande fire, LANL installed structures to prevent heavy runoff in the future, he added.

Comparing the two fires to try and predict impact is highly speculative, he pointed out. “The [Las Conchas] fire has not reached lab property.”

Cowabunga! Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is being investigated for throwing bunga bunga parties featuring underage girls/prostitutes. This gets complicated as Italian age of consent is 14. Legal age for a prostitute, however, is 18.

What would you do before running amok? Jared Loughner took photos of himself wearing only a thong and a Glock, and had them printed at Walmart. Here's the newly released video from Loughner's MySpace page.